[Peace-discuss] There Is No Rehabilitating the Vietnam War

[David Johnson]

The recent Ken Burns documentary about the Vietnam war is attempting to do
just that.

 

There Is No Rehabilitating the Vietnam War

There is enormous pressure and a lot of money working to rehabilitate
Vietnam, to put the guilt and the shame of it behind us. But it was
precisely the guilt of the people, their shame at what was being done in
their name, and their courage to denounce it that made it impossible for
their government to carry out the savagery any longer.

By  <https://www.globalresearch.ca/author/robert-freeman> Robert Freeman

Global Research, September 27, 2017

 
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/24/there-no-rehabilitating-vietn
am-war> Common Dreams 24 September 2017

Description:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/vietnam_legacy_0-40
0x209.jpg

Featured image: The Vietnam War, writes Freeman, "must be remembered and
condemned for the debacle it actually was." (Image:
vietnamfulldisclosure.org)

Since the day it ended, in 1975, there have been efforts to rehabilitate the
Vietnam War, to make it acceptable, even honorable. After all, there were so
many sides to the story, weren't there? It was so complex, so nuancical.
There was real heroism among the troops.

Of course, all of this is true, but it's true of every war so it doesn't
redeem any war. The Vietnam War is beyond redemption and must be remembered
and condemned for the calamity that it was. The Vietnam War was "one of the
greatest American foreign policy disasters of the twentieth century."

Those are not the words of a leftist pundit or a scribbling anti-American.
They are the words of H.R. McMaster, the sitting National Security Advisor
to the President of the United States.

Why must Vietnam be remembered and condemned for the debacle it actually
was?

First, the U.S. betrayed its own ideals in the War. In 1946, Vietnamese
president Ho Chi Minh approached U.S. president Harry Truman asking for the
U.S.'s help in evicting the French who had occupied Vietnam as a colony
since the 1860s. Hadn't the U.S. itself once fought a war of independence to
rid itself of European colonial domination?

Indeed, the opening words to the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence were
borrowed in sacramental reverence from the American Declaration. They echo
to every patriotic American:

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness."

Description:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/French_indochina_1953_12
_1.png

French soldiers fight off a Viet Minh ambush in 1952. (Source:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#/media/File:French_indochina_1953
_12_1.png> Wikimedia Commons)

But Ho was a communist. So, Truman turned him down and helped the French
instead. That was the "original sin" that made it impossible for the U.S. to
ever "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. It is what
ultimately doomed the War to failure. But that wasn't the only cardinal sin
the U.S. committed against its own putative ideals.

Eisenhower violated the 1954 Geneva accords that had settled the war with
the French and set up a puppet regime in the south. Hence "South" Vietnam,
which, not surprisingly, quickly disappeared once the Americans left. He
crammed a wealthy Catholic mandarin from New Jersey-Ngo Diem-on the people
who were overwhelmingly poor, Buddhist, and peasants.

Diem, with Eisenhower's blessing, then boycotted the elections for national
unification that had been agreed to in the accords. Eisenhower wrote later
that the reason for the boycott was that "Our guys would have lost." When
Diem could no longer suppress the swelling rebellion against his divisive,
hyper-oppressive rule, Kennedy had him assassinated.

Second, the U.S. carried out apocalyptic violence on Vietnam, vastly beyond
any conceivable moral standard of proportionality. It dropped three times
more tons of bombs on Vietnam than were used by all sides in all theaters in
all of World War II combined. Vietnam is about the size of New Mexico and at
the time had a population greater than New York and California put together.

The U.S. lost 58,000 lives in the War. But more than four million southeast
Asians-Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians-were killed, most of them civilians.
That's 69 southeast Asians killed for every 1 American. That is not a war.
That is a massacre, and on a scale approaching the Holocaust.

The U.S. sprayed 21 million gallons of carcinogenic defoliants on Vietnam,
including the notorious Agent Orange. More than half of the nation's forests
were destroyed. Vietnam was the greatest intentionally man-made
environmental catastrophe in the history of the world. Children are still
being born with birth defects from the residual poisoning.

On neighboring Laos, which, in 1965 had a population of 2.4 million, the
U.S. dropped 270 million cluster bombs. That's 113 cluster bombs for every
man, woman, and child in the country. More than 80 million of the bombs are
still unexploded today.

It's important to remember that neither Vietnam, nor Laos, nor Cambodia for
that matter, ever attacked the United States. They never wanted to attack.
They never tried to attack. They never had the capacity to attack. They had
simply wanted their own way of life.

Finally, the War was founded on and prosecuted with relentless lying. Your
mother once taught you, as all good mothers do, that if you have to lie
about something it's wrong.

The "intelligence" agencies lied to us, unremittingly, about the threat from
a nation of pre-Industrial Age farmers on the other side of the world who,
after nearly a century of colonial domination, simply wanted to be left
alone by western imperial powers.

Five successive presidents lied to the American people about the need for
the War and its likely winnability. None of them wanted to appear to be
"soft on communism." None wanted to be "the first American president to lose
a war."

The Pentagon Papers revealed that the military was saturated with lies, from
field level body counts to strategic reviews of progress. Truth tellers were
drummed out of the service, ensuring that only lies got passed up the chain.
The lies wouldn't be discovered until it was too late.

In fact, it is precisely our lying about the Vietnam War, both then and now,
and our knowledge of those lies, without ever having openly, unambiguously
repudiated them, that continues to make the War seem dishonorable.

The dishonor, of course, belongs not to the millions of soldiers who served
there but rather to the War itself. It belongs to the institutions-both
public and private-that profited from the War and lied to justify it, and to
the people whose silence and knowing acquiescence made them complicit in the
lies.

It belongs to those who put our soldiers, our children, in the perverse
situation not of doing honorable things honorably, but of having to try to
do dishonorable things honorably. For, despite the loftiest motives we might
invent for its beginnings, that is unquestionably what the War ultimately
became.

In March 1965, before the insertion of American ground troops that would
make the War irreversible, before the vast majority of the bombings and
killings would be perpetrated, a Pentagon briefing for Johnson stated that
the true goals in the War were, ".70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat;
20% to keep South Vietnam (and adjacent territories) from Chinese hands; and
10% to permit the people of Vietnam a better, freer way of life."

That is what the psychotic savagery of Vietnam was all about. It was not
bumbling goodwill gone awry as the rehabilitationists would have us believe.
It was not to bring democracy; not to defend against communism; not to help
the Vietnamese people. It was "to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat." Those
are the official, though at the time secret, words of the U.S. government.

Description:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/President_Kennedy_and_Se
cretary_McNamara_1962.png

 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy> Kennedy and
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara> McNamara (Source:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#/media/File:President_Kennedy_and
_Secretary_McNamara_1962.png> Wikimedia Commons)

We can summon an even greater authority than H.R. McMaster to confirm that
the War was wrong. Robert McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defense in both
the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He is the unquestioned architect
and chief strategist of the War.

In his memoirs McNamara wrote,

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the
decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles
and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those
values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations
to explain why."

There are no two more disparate authorities on the War than these two men.
They represent the old and the new, Democrat and Republican, civilian and
soldier, actor and critic, introspective and retrospective. Yet they reach
the same, damning conclusion.

There is enormous pressure and a lot of money working to rehabilitate
Vietnam, to put the guilt and the shame of it behind us. But it was
precisely the guilt of the people, their shame at what was being done in
their name, and their courage to denounce it that made it impossible for
their government to carry out the savagery any longer. Would that we had
that kind of guilt, shame, and courage among us today.

Remember: if we had to lie about it, it was wrong. That is as true today as
it was then, is it not? And wrong does not get made right by the louder or
repeated repetition of original lies. Or, by the artful contrivance of
newer, slicker, more personable ones.

Forgetting that lesson, or, worse, laundering it out of our memory so that
we might go forward with cleansed consciences and fortified zeal for still
more predation, would be a betrayal of itself that only the American people
can resist.

 

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